Lady Of Lake And Arrow |A Swan Lake Retelling|: Book One

Chapter 11

Ruelle - Madness

"Our king is power!" The adoring, blind people yell.

Oh, to wear a crown does not mean power, the Glass Thief thinks, named that for no one sees him, a ghost clear like glass.

The Glass Thief glides through the crowd, a snake slithering through the forest as it hunts its prey, stealing every precious trinket, every didante gold as the sun.

This is power, the Glass Thief thinks, pouches fat with a lifetime's worth, slipping out of the crowd as easily as he went in.

- The Glass Thief -

___

Jessa was back in the woods, running for her life.

No! Turn around and use your powers. Don't make the same mistake as last time! Her inner thoughts roared at her. Not the phantoms. Her instincts.

Nothing could stop her from running, so she ran and ran and ran, sprinting through the woods as the pounding footsteps got louder and louder. Never stopping, never tiring. Screams of the slaughtered she couldn't help echoed all around her, slowly pushing and trapping her in a mental cage. Tears streamed down her cheeks. No more. Please, no more. Jessa reached up to wipe the tears away before it could blur her vision. But when she took them away, her fingers were coated in black. The pounding footsteps faded, everything around her turning dark. A screech tore out of her as she felt herself flip end over end into an abyss. It was endless, her sanctuary before, and now her undoing–

"Jessa, Jessa!" A too-familiar person yelled. She couldn't move, feet frozen on the spot.

"Jessa?" The girl stopped in front of her, hand out in beckoning, smiling. Laila Eñere. So beautiful as usual, way more than her. The most beautiful in the whole land. Why wouldn't she be? Laila had perfect blond spirals of hair that framed her face perfectly, bronze skin shimmering in the sunlight. Even without the dress, nothing could hide what she looked like.

"Where are we going?" Jessa unintentionally croaked.

Her best friend smiled wider, always so kind in nature. "Why, the party of course, silly. You don't want to keep my sister waiting."

"You and Georgine are supposed to be dead," she blurted, immediately regretting it. Laila was unfazed.

"My brother, Braden, too. And your parents, my parents. All our other friends and family and people we don't know." She continued listing off all the names of the deceased people, dead because of the wretched horrors of the Baltain Massacre. Because Jessa couldn't help them, too selfish to save even one. Laila said them all with her too pretty smile, a spring of golden curl falling over her eye. She made no attempt to brush it away.

Jessa covered her ears, desperate to make it stop. She looked down, seeing herself wearing an impossibly long dress that pooled around her adorned in more gems than she could ever count. The dress was dark red . . . like blood.

When she looked up, expecting to see her haunting best friend, she only saw someone else. She let out a strangled, aching cry. For the person in front of her wasn't any of her friends or family–but herself, covered in wounds dripping with blood. Her fake-self stared back, tilting her head to the side in a familiar gesture Jessa herself did.

"Is this what you want?" Her fake-self asked. "All this, you know it was your fault. And nothing can change the past. The dead is waiting."

Out of anguish, despair, or both, Jessa lunged at the nightmare pretending to be her, ready to tear it to shreds, to make the torture stop, though also knowing she could never make it stop. Not in a lifetime.